August 29, 2010

Digital Libraries

It is amazing to see the advances being made in the digitalization of some of the world's most prestigious and prolific libraries and art collections. I wanted to share some of the collections I've been perusing lately.

In
addition to a great text selection, the Decorative Arts also have an
archive of ceramics and furniture. Here is a ceramic handwarmer.

The Textile Museum of Canada
has a collection spanning 2,000 years and 200 world regions. There are
more than 12,000 artifacts in their permanent collection and lucky for
us, they have digitalized over 6,000 of these. Their collection of
African commemorative cloths is incredible, featuring things like this 1987 commemorative MPR jacket, and the below North Egyptian rug fragment c 400.

Kids and adults will appreciate the Children's Library--an
online archive of more than 4,000 children's books in more than 54
languages. Read some of the children's books from the 1800's. Pretty
dark stuff.

BibliOdyssey is an incredible blog specializing in obscure book art--covering everything from folk art to fauna. Always very interesting background information on every title they feature. I loved the "Facebook in the 1750s" post.

My head is spinning just from collecting information for this post. It is unfathomable how much information is available to us instantaneously in this day and age. The foundations and people who make this possible are incredible.